In the battle over immigration reform, some believe we need to grant amnesty to “undocumented workers” because they do the jobs “Americans won’t do,” as George W. Bush once said. But there’s a new class of vacant jobs in U.S. manufacturing — call them “the jobs Americans can’t do.”

According to a story in the New York Times, many jobs, even in this recessive economy, go unfilled because employers can’t find applicants with the skills to perform them. Lest you think they’re searching for assembly-line workers with PhD’s, look at this excerpt from the Times piece:

All candidates at Ben Venue must pass a basic skills test showing they can read and understand math at a ninth-grade level. A significant portion of recent applicants failed,and the company has been disappointed by the quality of graduates from local training programs.

The company struggles to fill 100 positions.

As technology advances, humans who interact with it also must, but many don’t.

Why? Try my thesis on for size:

1) Job compartmentalization by powerful unions discouraged cross-training and skills development in exchange for “security.”
2) Teachers’ unions continue to produce high school “graduates” whose mental capabilities make them unworthy of the title.

In other words, the anti-competitive spirit of private- and public-sector unions conspires to dumb down its victims, making them into dependents — first of the union and then of the state, when the employer lets them go, or goes under. Even workers in non-union jobs and plants have felt the impact of career compartmentalization as unions have bullied employers to transform the logistics of the factory to suit their members’ alleged need for “security.”

In short, big union collectivism administers Novocaine to the brain, from the kindergarten classroom to the factory floor, thus slowing the economy.

But the depressing effect of unions goes beyond the school and workplace. Our elected officials show symptoms of cranial anesthesia as a result of the fact that big unions fund and run their political campaigns.

You can almost hear the dull hum of lethargic synapses in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s numbed skull as she says that extending unemployment benefits is “the best way to stimulate the economy.”

That’s right. Rep. Pelosi says the productive members of society should pay others to remain unemployed as a way to generate the juice that keeps our economy surging forward.

What else could she say?

Her campaign team — the public- and private-sector unions — have conspired to decimate the industries that were the driving force of U.S. prosperity. Union leaders and their favored politicians grow fat and mighty in the process.

Now that public sector unions have overtaken their private-sector counterparts in total membership, this same open conspiracy brings the mind-numbing power of collectivism to every corner of government.

Some conservatives believe that the Democrats want the United States to be a socialist nation.Whether that’s true, her government has already become so, employing multiplying legions of union-dependents who are unfit for any craft or trade other than “government work.”

So as the number of private-sector jobs that Americans can’t do swells, only one option remains for the people who have been doped and duped by collectivism: you can cash checks from the government — either for doing nothing at home, or for actively hampering economic growth by working for the government.

The solution: reintroduce liberty and its partner, uncertainty, into our schools, factories, and government.

Collectivism produces a numbing of the nerve endings, a somnolence of the synapses, a deadness of the soul. The only remedy is freedom.

Two hundred yards from where I sit is Dorney Park, an amusement company which charges customers $40 per day to repeatedly give them the sensation that they’re about to die. Of course, they don’t say it that way, but thousands of people daily flow through the Dorney turnstiles to experience uncertainty in all of its magnificent abandon. From my patio, I can hear the screams … of delight.

That’s right … the soul of man thrills to the threat of uncertainty.

Our work lives use to pulsate with that sensation. Will the crop survive? Will the twister take the barn? Will I kill the game, and thus eat another day? Will my store generate enough revenue this hour to cover expenses? Will this craft, that I see as a physical manifestation of the passion of my soul, so bewitch another that he will part with the bread of his honest toil in order to take possession of my art?

In negotiating away our freedom for security, we have done the sensible thing … and smothered the inner man. We have heard the sweet song of the union bosses who have wooed us from uncertainty to stasis. But life, she will not permit stasis. Change happens anyway. And now millions who cashed in their passion for a paycheck have long lost both.

Men are not machines. We make machines. We use machines to master our environment. And we must reject the schemes of those who would sap these fleeting days of their vitality. We must embrace the uncertainty, and live the freedom.

Scott Ott co-hosts a news, commentary and humor show called Trifecta on PJTV. He created and hosted the 20-part series on the Constitution titled Freedom's Charter. His satire site, ScrappleFace, spawned three books and praise from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and many others.

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1.
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Pretty soon our collectivised “workers” would have to “run the back door” to get hired. The Great Helmsman would be proud.

Scott, that’s one of the best insights I’ve heard from you, and I read most of what you write here (and at Scrappleface.) Not only are good jobs going unfilled, many of my (non-union) clients are forced to re-think, reorder and dumb down perfectly good business processes to accommodate workforces lacking requisite skills common only fifteen years ago, and that’s after raising wages to attract a “higher” level of talent. My heart breaks for some of the laid off union applicants I’ve seen. As you say, they’ve been deprived of opportunities to grow and acquire today’s skills.
Entry level positions must be filled by products of our educational system which has managed to combine ignorance, risk aversion and entitlement, producing a mostly useless crop of graduates.
We can still find risk takers and innovators, but not for all the bread-and-butter jobs where even a modicum of judgment and initiative are required.

What? They are testing applicants to evaluate if they are able to do the job?

I thought that was illegal since the Griggs v. Duke Power Company Supreme Court decision in 1971. Perhaps some of the illiterate job applicants who were rejected should call the ACLU and get themselves a fat payday.

Ever notice that we pay more and more for public education and always get less and less for it? I thought our “vaunted” Department of Education was going to set national standards that would make our “graduates” more competitive in the 21st Century? We spend literally billions of dollars each year on the Department of Education, a Department that was created under the Jimmy Carter administration (why am I NOT surprised about that). Yet we always hear about declining SAT scores, poor teacher performance, and high school graduates who STILL can’t read or write.

And did you ever notice that the answer to these problems from the liberal left is ALWAYS to spend more money? Of course, we need to spend more money on bad teachers in a system that promotes failure. What’s not to love? Just like the national economy, where we have already spent over trillion dollars on an economic policy which hasn’t produced any jobs, the answer “clearly” is to SPEND MORE MONEY! Are these people insane?

And did you also notice that private Catholic schools get much better results while spending a lot LESS money per child? Why do you think that is? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that they don’t have to deal with Teacher’s Unions and can set their own standards for success (which are a lot higher than the ones for public schools)?

This is just another example of a big, bloated, Federal bureaucracy failing as it always does to do what it’s supposed to do, which is to graduate students who can actually read and write (go figure). And the answer for almost every politician is to keep feeding money into this failed system in order to placate the Teacher’s Union. They are knowingly subsidizing a system that always fails and yet they keep doing it year after year. To me, that’s almost borderline treason, making this country go bankrupt even though they know what they’re doing doesn’t work.

Keep an eye on Chris Christie here in my state of New Jersey. He is the first politician (God bless him) to take on the Teacher’s Union in this state. He is constantly asking a simple question: In many poor cities in New Jersey (like Newark) we spend almost $29,000 per year per student, probably the highest amount in the country, and most of those graduates still can’t read or write (if they graduate at all). Forget for a moment that we can’t afford this anymore but, if this system is that broken, why keep paying for it? Sounds reasonable, right? Yet the Teacher’s Union has all but crucified this man here in this state, calling him Hitler and actually wishing for his death. Now you know why I HATE the Teacher’s Union so much.

We need a lot, and I mean A LOT, more politicians like Chris Christie who is actually demanding results for all of the money we spend. Christie is also demanding that the Teacher’s Union start taking some cuts in the outragious pension and health benefits teachers get in New Jersey, benefits that are literally bankrupting the state. All Americans should be demanding this. I sincerely hope that all of the conservatives that are elected this November feel the same way.

I watched your wonderful governor on Fox today. Oh. My. God. What a man! Not since the days of Reagan himself I have heard any political figure speak so clearly, nor act so decisively. GO GOV CHRISTIE!

Keep in mind that illegal wouldn’t be expected to be able to do them. The employer would be ordered to hire them as an affirmative action thing, pay them 25% more than an American (to compensate for some incidental rudeness in 1783) and if, as a result of all this, he goes broke and has to sell his business, the profits will have to be shared with the illegals who lose their jobs as a result.

i hear math studies in other countries are at a higher level than in the USA. the illegals may have trouble with English, but math is universal. keep giving little johnny his big helping of self esteem and his dose of entitlement.

I think you touch on the real problem here. Full disclosure: I am not American, so my perspective may differ from yours.

Immigration, legal and illegal, is changing the nature of America. Most immigrants come from third-world countries. Average IQ in those countries is lower than Americans’ (that’s why they are third-world countries). This lowers the average IQ in American schools. The DOE, fixated on “equality”, spends most of its resources on trying to close the “achievement gap”, but since IQ is genetically limited, without success. So they close the gap from the other end, by dumbing down the higher achievers.

The Soviet Union was an economic disaster, like every other Communist country. But they excelled on many fronts, beating the USA to space, because they concentrated their resources on their best performers. China is doing the same. If America persists in its “we are all the same, and diversity is our greatest strength” strategy, it will inevitably devolve to a third-world nation country.

@AnalogMan – Clearly you have a different perspective to me.
First, average IQ doesn’t measure capability, but current level of achievement. The achievement levels for immigrants and exchange students from China, India, and many other countries when given the same chance in US colleges are typically higher than for our own students. So, it’s all about drive and opportunity, not IQ.
Second, I would rather EVERYONE has as much opportunity as possible. But, it has to start somewhere, and if I’m paying for it I expect it to start with my children, but I’m perfectly happy if it would also benefit other children as well. However, to whom do you give this God like power to choose who gets a chance and who doesn’t? Are you going to decide, is Obama? And, what if the person or committee chosen to make the decision determines that Russians or Europeans or Africans or Chinese don’t have enough “IQ” to make it worth giving them an opportunity? Do we decide next to withhold food and other resources from them as well? Are they too stupid to keep alive? Where does it stop?
My, how arrogant your perspective seems!

I was disappointed in this article. The author has gone beyond a reasonable argument that the unionism has a vested interest in making workers ignorant to a bizarre theory that collectivism is a mental disease. Worse, the article failed to live up to its teaser that we are not producing industrial workers. I have some acquaintance with this subject and I know that it has far less to do with unions, whatever their shortcomings, than with an obsession with mass production. My cousins and their families in Jamestown, New York, found their jobs in machinist shops disappearing due to the dearth of custom orders. Once the older ones retired, and the younger ones moved to other employment, the ferry across Chautauqua Lake needed a custom part to repair it but there were no more machinists to fabricate it. They replaced a peaceful ferry service across the lake with a stretch of interstate as a consequence.

The original part was custom-machined. There was no mass-produced replacement available. There was no way to simply “get” a replacement, nor were there “new and improved” cable ferries at the time. I doubt there are now. I suspect that the original choice of flat-bottomed cable ferry, rather than a ferry boat, was based on considerations, such as water depth, which would make a ferry boat not viable as a replacement. Stacking that against a powerful state highway department eager to complete a high speed highway in the Southern Tier all the way to Interstate 90, and the defenders of the ferry were doomed as soon as it required an irreplaceable part, i.e. not long after the last machinist shop closed up in Jamestown.

Neither. It is a method of political economic action available to the poor and powerless. Personally, I consider it flawed, but I wouldn’t commit its practitioners to the insane asylum. If anything, that should be reserved to political partisans since they surrender their minds to political platforms and talking points.:)

Maybe they needed a toolmaker, not a machinist. I don’t believe the ferry company couldn’t contract a skilled machinist or toolmaker somewhere in the USA, who could do the job. Or did the Union Brothers forbid it?

Sorry, Carl Peter, but you just made the case for keeping up with technology if you want to stay employed. That’s not the same thing as producing “industrial workers” who only know how to do one thing. Life in the 21st century requires an agile mind, critical thinking, and adaptibility, none of which is being imparted in our current educational system.

I wasn’t arguing against keeping up with technology. I was pointing out that the mass production of hardware killed off the machinist industry, not unionism. I will go even further. It was due to the increasing power of national corporations that mass produced hardware took over the production of hardware so completely that local — thus idiosyncratic and custom — demand has been shut out. BTW, this is not simply a Home Depot issue. The national corporate takeover of hardware was from industrial demand, retail demand being an afterthought occurring after the fact.

My prescription to this ailment of our economy is that of the Populists: no alien (meaning out-of-state) ownership. For example, it is fine for Coca-Cola to operate a bottling plant in Georgia and realize whatever economies of scale it can there, but expansion into South Carolina or New Jersey would be prohibited since it funnels multiple state demand for bottling plant machine parts through the one company. The companies supplying the parts to Coca-Cola would still be able to serve potentially different bottling machines in South Carolina or New Jersey. If there is coalescing on one type of bottling machine among different bottlers throughout the United States, it will be because of the merits of its design, NOT because of the multiple state reach of one or a few bottlers.

My Physicist dad just sent the CAD design for a custom part to the computerized machinists. That was 20 years ago. Now, custom parts are sintered in any desired alloy via a 3D printer to shapes impossible for a traditional machinist to create. The US military doesn’t send spare parts to the field, it sends printers and powdered metal to the field. There may have been a rational explanation for why the custom part couldn’t be procured, but lack of traditional machinists is not such an explanation. They are disappearing because they aren’t needed anymore.

What we do need is people who understand how to design said parts – i.e. yet another job fewer and fewer Americans are able to do.

This was about 40 years ago. Apparently, the ferry was fixed afterward, but by then it was a moot point. The lake now has this hideous highway bridge across it. Perhaps, if the timing was better, the new technology could have kept the ferry running at a key juncture and stopped the bridge.

Stuart: This technology is certainly available in high-end military circles, but not to the average farmer, logger, excavator or custom car builder. And that is why I (as a retired machinist/engineer) have established a small machine/welding shop in my western Washington farm community. The machinist trade will live on because of the need to repair warn machinery and/or fabricate specialty equipment and parts/assemblies that are no longer commercially available.

You folks are all clueless about the inner workings of education. Union teachers would would dearly like to be effective in educating their wards, but the tenor of the times does not permit it.

I recall the push for technical education that occurred right after Sputnik was launched by the Russians in the early sixties. Our high school received college-level academic texts as part of an NSF grant for their library and those students who could devoured them.

However, thirty years later New York State Regents Biology was extended from two semesters to three. Sequential Math was dropped for less rigorous studies. I recall the principal of a New York City high school reporting that he was pleased as punch that he had graduated 3 of about 400 seniors with Regents diplomas. What I later found out was that his 9th grade had had 900 students. Only 400 had made it to their senior year.

It is a vicious circle: Students lack interest and fail academic courses that are then reduced in difficulty but still fail to raise interest in the students for their reduced difficulty.

We have placed the responsibility for education on the teachers and schools. That is clearly why our students have failed. It is the responsibility of the students to learn. Their futures are at stake, unless they can rely upon a Pelosi solution.

My suggestion: Develop massive computer libraries with texts and workbooks, yes ordinary texts, starting from the first grade through beginning college level courses. Start each student at a level that he can manage and then guide him through the texts allowing forward movement only after mastery. Thus, you might find many students working on fourth grade texts who are in high school. So what! They will claw their way through texts and tests on their own without benefit of teacher lectures, but with access to teachers when they have questions. Today students do not even have to formulate questions. In other words, students do not even know what they don’t know.

Drop the “industrial model” of education now! While an educated population may be important for our society, an education should be viewed as a privilege by each individual student. We will call the program “Self-Schooling for Success.” I just made that up, but it is good enough. Keep every student as long as he wants to stay. Allow sabbaticals for those who cannot muster the effort now. Let them come back when they are ready. It is their lives! They will only take their education seriously when we re-institute the right to fail and the right to succeed.

In summary, what is lacking from education today is the idea of mastery. Reintroduce mastery and insist upon individualized self-instruction.

Think this is bad for industry, one reason given for the low numbers of qualified young men AND women that CAN enter the military (as the qualifications NOW stand) a lack of a comprehensive understanding of 8th grade math, (geometry and pre-algebra). It is MORE than Johnny or Mary are out of shape and physically unable to do many tasks safely, they are also lacking in basic communication and mathematical skills.

Very good analysis. Scott, there is a bit more to the Union story. It is part, if not the major reason behind the October Revolution and the establishment of the USSR. Most of my knowledge comes from family history through my grandfather who was born in 1862 and reported on the effects this system,the Bolshevik, had on the Mid West where he grew up in the 1870s. We were never taken in by their promises but knew them for what they were. That is why the organized labor movement is associated with Russia, its first captive victim so the system preceded the USSR and is not the it product. It is not the child of Russia but Russia was the victim of the union mentality that you have described so well. It is tyrannical in nature and consider just how free its members are. You have already touched on their victimization of their members and further research will confirm that when they are in charge you do as they say, not as you will. The Union owns you just as the South owned slaves.

The risk of free enterprise is that its legal to make mistakes and you are responsible for the consequences. We are not liable for peoples welfare, just concerned and willing to lend a helping hand where needed. We understand that in order to make a trade you have to have something that is more valuable to me that the thing I am trading but the thing I am trading must also have an equal value to you to make the deal work. When the Lord gave the law to Moses he gave the instructions to make the system work and it has always produced peace and then prosperity.

** Jas 4:1 ¶ From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?**

So when we follow our lusts we forsake peace. We sow strife and discord which lead directly to poverty. Check out Hamas against the Israeli green house operators they drove out of Gaza and how some of these same Israelis moved on to some barren land, used desalinated sea water for irrigation and are now a thriving community raising produce for sale. Why don’t the Palestinians do this instead of shower rockets on Israel? Do they lack opportunity or just the will?

Can it be true that there are myriad unemployed American adults who can’t do “9th grade” math? Can it be true that companies are just unable to find people with the right skills here in the US of A? It’s all the fault of a “collectivist” attitude, right? I say it’s not. First of all, this can’t be true. Whatever 9th grade math is (Algebra, right? Or are you supposed to have mastered that by 5th grade these days the way some parents talk), is it necessary for the job? Or does the company want to be assured they’re not hiring idiots (did the Times article say anything like that?, perhaps they should’ve).

If it’s collectivism that’s to blame, then why aren’t there jobs that are matched to the abilities of these lowbrows? According to their abilities, they should be able to something, right? How about picking up trash on the beach? How about sorting trash from recycling bins? How about something useful – BUT perhaps not so well-paying that they will be able to reproduce, eh? Well, then you get the angry young man problem and good recruitment pool for terrorists…

In the world of reality, there are plenty of folks of authority (at various levels) who fail those who cannot make the grade. Those who fail move on to something they can do tolerably well and perhaps make a living at. Are there no workhouses? Are there no orphanages?

The real skills all companies look for are two: you’re already trained and you are easy to fire once the work is done. That is it. And perhaps a nation of independent contractors is what’s desired by some but if that became the case, most of the smart people would choose piracy as a career. Arr!

Whatever 9th grade math is (Algebra, right? Or are you supposed to have mastered that by 5th grade these days the way some parents talk), is it necessary for the job?

School math is for developing logic and an ability to analyse.
Some school math is necessary in daily life especially when needed to handle financial transactions and the logic and analysis is needed to enable one to distinguish fact from fantasy especially with all the spin in the media these days..

Some school math is required, Cynic? Who hasn’t been to a retail outlet and found a clerk that can’t figure out a 10% discount without a calculator? Or determine what your change is from $10 for an $8.46 purchase without the register. No, the teachers unions have made simple math a non-issue with the advent of machines. When a child can’t do a simple calculation in their head how the heck can they handle the complex problem of, say.. voting? I agree with you logic and analysis need to be encouraged but, schools (and courts, in fact) are now all about empathy and hysterics (globull warming).

Voting? Easy: the Panthers will assist. Moreover, even without being able to assess and interpret simple numerical data (apples & oranges), one can be the U.S. president. (NEWS QUOTE: Abenoga Solar says it is planning to build the largest solar power plant in the world in Arizona. According to the company’s website, 1,500 new jobs will be created during the plant’s construction with 100 positions for staff to maintain it. The second company, Abound Solar Manufacturing, will manufacture state-of-the-art thin film solar panels, the first time anywhere that such technology has been used commercially. Plants will be built in Colorado and Indiana, creating 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.
Mr Obama said the projects would provide more than 5,000 new jobs. Nearly $2bn in loan guarantees will be given to the two companies to kick-start the US solar energy industry.
Around 125,000 jobs were lost in the last month, the government reported.)

Throw enough at the Unions and maybe something will stick and detract our attention away from what has really caused this country to slip and slide: Big Business and Big Government.

Wall Street and Washington D.C. has been the one that has hurt the people on Main Street and the children they have brought into the world. The education in our country has just become another political football with our kids tossed back and forth between the parties so some politician can get elected, send his/her kids to private school while they use the public school system as their playground.

Stop blaming the people who band together and insist on a living wage and safe working conditions as the reason this country is in trouble. Stop using the workers as your political football and our kids to write your stupid opinion piece. If the kids aren’t getting a good education, it’s because your playing with their lives to score points in a game that we are just about sick of watching.

Lynn, you’re quick to recognize real or perceived problems in business but slow to recognize oppression by those you think are your friends. The unions have evolved into just another racket that tries to make members think they give a rat’s a$$ about their welfare. They work you like all the other politicians work you – for their own benefit. I would think you’d have learned something from the autoworkers’ experience – their unions didn’t understand economics and priced their membership out of jobs. I’m pretty sure the union leadership is still living pretty well. With friends like those…….
As an employer, I can state as fact that young people today lack the skills we need in our industry. These are skills that were taken for granted 30 years ago. They have difficulty in consistently following instructions, problem analysis, application of past experiences to new problems, basic math and statistics, language, writing, spelling, etc.
As long as we teach kids that others have a responsibility to ensure their welfare (mom & dad, school, employers, unions, government, etc) they won’t bother to take the initiative to care for themselves or engage in lifelong learning. This problem will be around a long time.
Your trite criticism doesn’t advance a solution.

My children went to public schools and learned in spite of the system. In the advanced math classes my son took he and some of the other students routinely had to take turns teaching the class as the material was beyond the ability of their teacher. In my youngest daughters class she had several teachers that could not spell properly when writing on the board and the teachers routinely asked her if something was spelled correctly. The quality of teachers and the programs of instruction being taught to children are the biggest problems with culture issues being a secondary issue. I have had some first hand experience with this from involvement with junior achievement. In addition I also have some experience as a guest volunteer teacher teaching some practical applications for science and mathematics. During that time in my life I reconstructed traffic accidents for a living and would take an accident case and pose problems to the class and help them work through the problems to arrive at the solutions. It was amazing to see the kids in class jump into the process of problem solving by using physics and algebra, geometry and logic to answer practical questions in the real world. At all of the schools I demonstrated the use for math and science the children had a very positive attitude toward learning and wanted to know when I could come back and teach class again. That interest in learning was across all races and genders, the teachers I was involved with all were quite pleased that I got the kids interested in learning and said they performed much better after my demonstration.

This is not an attempt to say that I am much better at teaching than others, although I do like it but to demonstrate the problem mainly is the program being offered is inadequate to meet the needs of the students.

I’m all for a living wage & safe working conditions. Now explain why someone has to pay dues for those “privileges”. Do workers “band together” & choose their best & brightest to represent them at no cost? No, they’d rather pay big bucks to a thug from some other state to do their bidding. Teachers in NJ were sure unpleasantly surprised when they found out their “leader” was making $550K/yr (plus a ton of additional goodies) while they whined the Governor wants them to pay 1.5% of their salary for healthcare (yikes, 1.5%…what an outrage)! Face it, unions are nothing more than coffers for democrats.

I read and watch history, and I listen to my elders. I know what the living and working conditions were like before laborers began to join together as a group and negotiate their living/working conditions. It was not too long ago that children spent their day in the factories and negotiating a eight hour day was considered a success because the norm was twelve hours and more. You have lost a great historical perspective of the building of this nation if you don’t know or haven’t learned how the Unions contributed to the gains by the ordinary people in this country.

You should think a little and know that businesses form unions except call them associations, and you should think a little and know how governments form unions but call them political parties influenced by lobbyists that are businesses (industry) looking to influence the government. The money they pay is an investment and an acknowledgment of the people coming together, power in numbers.

Our education system is not being wrecked by Unions. This is politics plain and simple by businesses and the government and they are using the children of this country to gain power. I recall a time in our history where the Irish were considered inferior workers and refused jobs. There are many other races who the government and business wanted to suppress for their own profit and/or political gain. Well guess what? Now our Irish, Italian, African, Spanish, Puerto Rican, Chinese…children are being targeted by those who would rather step on their heads to get up the ladder than make sure there are plenty of ladders to climb in our quest for success.

Guess what we gave them life which we could of easily taken away, as they so clearly know, and now we can get busy telling them why they are inferior and not up to snuff for even a factory position. Now we need something to blame for their lack of a proper education and at the same time make political points and make some business man/woman feel better about him/herself in dealing with the “unwashed masses”.

Our children are smart they are after all God’s children. If they don’t know the basics of education, reading, math, and writing by the time they leave grade school it is a massive failure of ALL PEOPLE in this country. The parents should form a UNION and put a stop to this nonsense once and for all.

A bit of a paradox, isn’t it? All things being equal, I don’t approve of starvation wages, sweatshop conditions, and unlimited exploitation of employees. On the other hand, if you’re union you deserve all the above, and worse besides. For God’s sake, come back, Colonel Pinkerton: posterity needs you, and your military record is forgiven!

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The uncertainty of risk, the not knowing what comes next, preparing for the down times, and celebrating the good – the freedom to fail, and to succeed – is what drives people who are optimistic about what lies ahead.

Have you ever heard optimistic rhetoric – based on self-support – from a union official, or Nancy Pelosi?

“Her campaign team — the public- and private-sector unions — have conspired to decimate the industries that were the driving force of U.S. prosperity.”

This applies particularly to California. The heyday for California with all of its infrastructure built out and investments was in the 1950s through 1980s when space and military related investments drove the aerospace industry and contributed to the rise of Silicon Valley. Today, aerospace and defense related industries are ignored (at best) or outright scorned by many California politicians. Well there policies are now bearing fruit…chickens coming home.

This article describes the problem but completely misses the causes for lack of qualifications among American workers. Unions aren’t the cause, in fact many unions have their own training programs that really improve their members’ qualifications. Instead of blaming unions, the author should look at the present day American culture. Many Americans are “spoiled brats” with high expectations of everybody except themselves.

when we learned even chewing gum was considered too distracting for students. where the hell are the people who are allowing cell phones and kids texting during school. stupid parents. these kids don’t learn anything or study, forget about what you remember. i have friends who have tried to teach in urban schools with mostly all minority students. the kids yelled and screamed and ate lunch and had their back o the teacher. the teachers i know just walked out and never looked back. these kids are unteachable. any crazy thing they hear they just repeat as a mantra, there’s no critical reasoning involved.
corporations, even smallish businesses are citizens. if they hire union machinists who are experienced to train young people, they will have their work force. but don’t tell us that you want to pay $8-$10hr. and think you’ll be covered.
since we are pc in every aspect of our culture we will never get the truth out there.
That NO you can’t be whatever you want to be. you have to have the specific talent that fits into the right niche. there are great wAitresses, and rocket scientists and machinists, and scientists and so on.
if we don’t get this right we are not just going down we are swirling down, and fast.

I can’t speak to unions in factories limiting members options, having never worked in one. However, I do have experience with Laborers International and IBEW. Both those unions have outstanding training programs for their apprentices. High standards are enforced, and any graduate of the program knows his or her stuff cold. I will say I lived in Alaska and maybe our unions are unique. Were I still there I would encourage my grown children to join any trade union program for a great career. During my time as a Laborer, Local 942 (I got on the “C” list having possessed previous construction experience) I attended numerous classes to train me to perform various tasks and be qualified in areas that requred certification. Apprentices had plenty of classroom time and were rotated between different job assignments to ensure they were well rounded workers.

I currently work for the Army in Public Works. A co-worker who was hired last hear worked for decades as an IBEW electrican. He is by far the most knowledgeable electrician in the shop. He can quote the NEC in detail, and knows how anything and everything should be wired and installed.

I am a Reagan conservative, and know well that Union leadership are strong supporters of the Leftist agenda. But “the union” is not a monochromatic entity. There are some good things about them.

The thing that has always gotten me is that the same people who say illegals do “work that Americans won’t do” are the same people who want to instantly transform them into American citizens. And once you do this they won’t want to do that kind of work either. Why should they if they can get more money from the government that they can from working.

The near complete destruction of vocational education in America has done us massive amounts of harm. Outside of the military and a few private schools, we simply don’t train enough people to be the absolutely vital high skilled technicians that make advanced civilization work.

A lot of kids have no interest in going to college or working jobs that require a college degree. No one in their family may have a degree and none of the jobs they imagine themselves doing require one. They do relate strongly, however, to skilled technical work and would very much like to it if someone would teach them. They find themselves trapped in an ineptly implemented and apparently pointless college track education. They get discouraged and drop out.

This is largely the result of the narcissism of the left. Back in the 70s, leftists decided it was a great tragedy if 1 in 20 students in the vocational track could have done better in college. Their solution? Destroy the vocational education of the other 19 students so that the one buddy intellectual would be endanger of spending a few years doing skilled manual labor. Leftists think it far more important to make sure we get yet one more Women’s studies major than 19 more machinist.

I agree with your comment. I completed a machinist apprenticeship in the 1970′s and worked in trade-related technical fields for 35 years. I also established (by direction) and managed a trades apprentice program (with more than 50 apprentices) at the Navy research lab I worked at.

One of the obvious problems with today’s public school vocational programs is there are few teachers with the knowledge and skills to teach such subjects. Teachers unions require highly qualified individuals to complete collegiate accreditation (indoctrination) programs to teach mathematics, science and vocational courses. The leftists’ (union and government) ultimate goal, of course, is a dumbed-down, thoroughly indoctrinated, government-dependent population…which they have all but achieved. A skilled trade and/or technical education allows one to barter those skills and escape the clutches of government dependance. And freedom from victimhood is the last thing Obongo, Pelosi and their union thugs desire for Americans.

I had some first-hand experience with our vanishing vocational education system at my previous job as manufacturing manager. I needed to hire skilled machinists, but kept getting applicants who were instead machine operators. The difference in skillsets is great. A machine operator merely loads material into a computerized machine, presses the green “go” button and watches the machine make a part. There is no knowledge of materials necessary to insure that the tools are cutting efficiently, nor math to write the program that tells the machine what to do, nor the geometry that is used when designing the part, I could go on, but I think you get my point.

During the 1970′s, when I received my vocational training in machine shop, I started operating dangerous machinery at the tender age of 15. With the proper instruction and warning, this can be done safely at that age. Sure, we got hurt occasionally in class, but the injuries were never life threatening or terribly serious. And the smarter of us never got hurt at all because we paid attention to safety at all times and in every instance.

Today’s nanny-staters bear a great deal of the blame for our current lack of vocational training. By treating others as children, they create a self-fulfilling scenario.

On the other hand, the fact that I’m reading more and more people who wonder where our manufacturing jobs went is heartening. I was a manufacturing success story, having received my training through vocational education, and later through an apprenticeship of four years.

We need to return to being a country that makes things again. The demand for the products of modern life is not diminishing, rather, there’s a great hunger for it. We would be stupid not to take advantage of that opportunity. We can compete, we should compete, but first, we need a government that also recognizes the benefits that manufacturing have brought and could bring again to our great country.

Especially now, we need the diversity of jobs that manufacturing provides. We’ve gotten away from a national tradition of craftsmanship. We are the most productive country the world has ever known. Our innovations have done more to elevate the situation of mankind than any other nation in history. Unfortunately, we’re currently being denied our destiny by short-sighted, misguided politicians.

If we were at all serious about a manufacturing revival in the US, we could start with a national right-to-work law that makes unions compete in the marketplace and removes their protected status.

At one time in these Great United States of America when a person (through no fault of their own) became unemployed He/She could receive a small check to meet the basic necessities of life until they went out and found a job.
in 2010 unemployment insurance is being abused in a major way. Two men in my neighborhood (and maybe more) have been unemployed for over two years each. Each one when they became unemployed actually sought jobs, but little by little they both quit looking for work, and simply lived off of Unemployment. One actually turned down employment making the same pay with benefits he were making before he was laid off. Both of these men’s benefits were extend over two years each.
One of these men who was working as a roofer, went down to the Veterans office and was declared Handicapped because he claimed to be Bi-Polar, He also hired a lawyer and went to Social Security with the same old song and dance, and low and behold he now receives Social Security Disability Benefits besides the Veterans benefits. This man also has a part time job delivering major appliances from Lowe’s and Home Depot, and also does small roofing jobs on the side. When this man found this ruse to work for him He hired the same lawyer he used, to file a claim with Social Security for his wife and claimed she was blind, low and behold she also receives Social Security Disability benefits even though her eyesight in near perfect (she does not even wear glasses). These two examples of extended Unemployment Benefits and the Social Security abuse leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Thanks for the information. I have always wondered where the “discouraged workers” statistic came from. I have been unemployed on several occasions but I never saw “being too discouraged to look for work” as an option since my parents had the lack of foresight to leave me without a fat trust fund.

I am reminded of an article I read about Margaret Thatcher’s England. When she first turned around the UK economy, statisticians were puzzled at first that the increased number of jobs did was not matched by a similar decrease in unemployment numbers. What they found was that many of the people who were working in the revived British economy had previously been on some sort of disability payments. When working in the private economy started paying better than carefully documenting medical or mental disabilities for social workers, people with the skills to navigate the social welfare system went where the money is. You should raise your opinion of your neighbors for having the initiative to flourish in Obama’s new economic environment. You could call it “Going Galt” on the government tit.

OK….I get it…it is easy and fun to attack teachers and teacher unions. However, not all of the problems with education today can be laid at their feet. The biggest problem in education today is that parents and students no longer value education and see it as a path to a better life. Another problem is administrators are no longer willing to retain students who cannot perform at grade level. There is no stigmma or consequences for failure, at least through middle school, and by then it is too late for many.

Gahrie, he’s not attacking teachers in general, just unionized teachers who have drunk the Kool-Aid and serve to indoctrinate rather than teach. (And not all teachers are unionized, BTW; here in Texas, they’re not allowed to do that. There are some professional organizations that teachers sometimes join, but not a union per se.)

Unions in general lost their purpose decades ago, once we no longer had sweatshops over here. Now they’re just breeding grounds for laziness, turning otherwise productive members of society into mostly unproductive leeches, while serving as breeding grounds for thuggery.

And there never should have been such a thing as a teachers’ union; teaching is a profession, not a blue-collar trade. When’s the last time you saw the doctors or lawyers go on strike?

Sooner, or later, this category of discussion—“job-readiness” —first, gets around to the fault resting with the educational institution, and then finally, boils the blame down to rest on the parent—quite obviously. However, . . .
There’s a line of Scripture which runs: “I am the Lord, that is my name, and my glory will I not give unto another.”.
Currently, in this American administrative system, principal points of contention surround matters pertaining to relative position and claim to fame, between the parent and various buildings full of governmental administrators: eventually, the school administrators—at 100k to 200k per year—and their teachers, discern something of the fact that, without the helpful participation of the parents, they can not help children to learn.
Few—if any—teachers, and not many parents understand that, there’s a connection between God and parents—and, not at all existing between governmental administrators and God—such that, drawing from that line of Scripture, if the children are to advance, the rule here to be deduced is that, it will be the parents in the first place who will receive the Societal nod—and not those previously mentioned, governmental administrators and their teachers—of a class which are forever desirous of preeminence in Society, and—and as may be seen on C-SPAN—among themselves, in unctuous intonations, showering each other with meretricious encomiums—they just love! it.
The very great problem is that, naturally, they face their jobs in life very much in the administrative pattern which was advocated by Admiral Lord Nelson—though all the while, ignoring that superior nexus of relationship with its attendant duties and protection. And, of course, very many of the governmental administrators and their teachers—having some premonition of the intractable nature of problems having to do with the net output of their work—send their own children to private schools; and, of course, than the 29k per year mentioned, most usually, at something less.
In sum—and, drawing from a reasoning leader from the past—considering the endemic ignorance of parents by the governmental administrators and their teachers, are we to be found to have set ourselves against God? Surely, all of whole mind will agree and say that, year by year, to continue to throw ever larger bundles of money at the nation’s “job-preparedness” problem, and than has been the nation’s experience lo! these many decades, just hoping for a different result, puts us as the actor in that opprobrious category; and, is it at all to be supposed that, these things are soon to change?
If for our times, in borrowing from Lord Nelson I do his memory no violence, I offer for the reader’s consideration that, for the present moment, perhaps the best which can be done is to be thankful that, he laid out the track for success so plainly as that, even a high-school graduate can understand it: “Kiss the boots of your superior, and hate the Moslems like the devil.” — at least, our governmental administrators and their teachers are making a living, . . .

“The real skills all companies look for are two: you’re already trained and you are easy to fire once the work is done”—Trent Meercat

Trent, how many companies form around a finite need? Companies form around a demand that’s perpetual, like food or products that eventually wear out and need a replacement or upgrade. For companies that do form to provide contract labor on finite projects, and the work actually does “get done,” are you suggesting the company should be on the hook to continue to pay them for life whether their particular skill is needed there or not? Exactly what magical business model would make such an enterprise sustainable? YOU should start up such a company and become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.

Quality work and effort has always been the best job/career security. With that to offer, an employer would be a fool not to hire you or contract and re-contract with you.

The idea to transform America into a 100% ‘consumer and or service’ based economy was based on the premise that ALL jobs not related to consumerism or service are exportable. It sounds to me as though ‘Ben’ hasn’t learned that for workers of manufacturing jobs he needs to go overseas to south east asia. As for the basic skills produced by the schools, they are providing only what people need to be consumers. Nothing. Unions can’t be blamed either. They are political tools, not skills developers. If you want to excel at something it’s up to YOU to provide the motivation and intelligence to improve your self. No one else is to blame.

I actually wrote a long post about the problems facing manufacturing in the US. And realized that it boiled down to people in this country not understanding that ALL the prosperity we enjoy came from factories and real Americans making things to sell to each other. And the rest of the world. With the manufacturing sector in decline it’s just a matter of time ’till the rest of the economy goes with it.

I have to call BS on this article. In every recession I see articles like this that wallow in self deprecation. Perhaps the employer is offering a wage that is below the market. Alot of employers are still wishing they could hire based on last years’ conditions. For skilled employees, the job market has at stopped crashing and is firming up a little.

I know an HR director who is trying to fill a large number of clerical and data entry positions in a large city. She says she is getting plenty of applicants and will meet her hiring goal.

“clerical and data entry”. Not at all the same as skilled,technical manufacturing positions. Not even close. Programming, setup and maintaining of CNC machinery, robotics, laser machinery, etc. takes real skill, experience and judgement. That’s why these guys without a “college degree” can make so much money.

Amen my well-disciplined brother. There is no such thing as a free lunch (especially in a union), and it’s about time we reclaimed our inheritance.

July 4, we will be having a Tea Party at Santa Monica Pier and we will also be welcoming Matthew Perdie to the end of his 3600 mile walk across America. (6 pm) Anyone and everyone in the area is invited.

They don’t have skills because they never even look to learn them. Nobody expects to work in manufacturing. Everyone is going to be something more exotic, or just make it somehow. The American dream used to involve working to get the goodies. Now the dream is just the goodies, which will just come somehow. Hope and Change.

Scott, you left out law enforcement on all levels, who cower behind draconian “no tolerance” rules. The latest victim: an Omaha mother, charged with a felony because she knew her son made dry ice bombs out of two-liter soda bottles.

When the War on Curiosity forbids by law the talented among us from using their abilities, merely because of what could happen, is it any surprise John Galt’s name is on our tongues?

I spent the end of that happy time traveling overseas training inferior workers how to take the jobs of Americans. No ifs ands or buts. I didn’t work in the automotive industry so maybe thats an exception.

I do accept that people in other countries deserve a shot to. But it steams me to remember all my old friends replaced by cheap labor, and then to hear managments excuse replayed to a gullible audience.

In the end all we are doing is saying we want our workers to live the same way they do in the ghettos in asia. and from what I saw with my own eyes, that thought makes me sick at heart.

Everyone wants cheap goods and a high salary for themselves and they dont care about the consequences.

No. People in other countries are not American citizens. The American government has obligations to American citizens. It owes the rest of the world nothing, save non-interference. Immigration is not a charitable obligation; it’s a privilege to be earned by contributing something positive. Something that America needs, not the immigrant.

Be interesting if there was a racial breakdown on exactly who is failing the 9th grade level testing. I don’t suppose there would be any correlation between a street ethic of deriding education as being “too white” and illiteracy on the job.

Equally, I’ve never seen any numbers to indicate what races comprise what percentage in union jobs. I’ve read elsewhere that unions jealously protect that information, if (indeed) they even know it.

It just seems to me that if you have generations being brought up to hate education, drop out of school, live on welfare and have babies, then what you’ll end up with is Detroit. And employers unable to fill entry-level jobs.

How hard would it be to make and program a robot to do 9th grade word recognition and basic math, and to *not* recognize the words “racism” or “affirmative action” or “lawsuit”.

Having responded to your query re: racial breakdown before, I have to do so once again since the general indication I provided must have been deleted, for some strange reason, by a moderator. I refer you specifically (as well as the censoring moderator) to http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_31.htm; you will find the data there.
Due to the previous instance of censorship, this is also the last comment I make here. I have no time for those who try and suppress the truth.

Scott, could I hope to have your commentaries as a regular weekly article? That would be fantastic. This is a different tone from Scrappleface and one that I only see periodically in the Trifecta episodes. More, please!

The thing about any article that talks about one specific piece of one specific topic is that, by necessity, a ton of tangential stuff is left off–you can see this in the comments section, people have raised topics that are certainly related but can’t be discussed in one single article. I think this fact is the thing that disheartens many of us: the problems seems so stinking huge that we give up and just say forget it.

Bottom line, lest I wander any further off topic: LIBERTY and FREEDOM are the answer to America’s ills. Yaron Brook said it very well awhile back. To paraphrase: if a particular decision does not enhance my liberty, then vote it down. Liberty and freedom are the foundation for all decisions of public (and personal) policy.

Like so many of you responding to the article we see candidates walk through our manufacturing doors with high school and college degrees that can’t write a complete sentence and have no skill sets: CNC programming, CAD design or the basic mechanical skills. I am not sure they can change their own oil. What have their parents done to guide their children? Nothing! I have several teacher friends and they are at wits end because their union could care less about them and would cut them loose in a heartbeat if the parents take them to arbitration. And the real problem they point out is the bureaucrats demanding “no child left behind” and other ridiculous practices and punch lines with no accountability laid at the feet of either the parents or the students. We have too many over uneducated academia types in the top government positions, including superintendents, with no wisdom and even less common sense.

Part of the dumbing of education is the insistence that everyone goes to college (as espoused by Obama himself.) The liberals denigrate the trades and vocational schools, despite the need for plumbers, carpenters, etc (in fact, I could make an argument that plumbers do more for the common public health than physicians….) Yet many people are happy in such vocations and would not be happy being forced to attend college and study subjects for which they have no use (and are useless for employment.) Thus these students are unwilling students yet the drive to put them into college means a lowering of standards for all. When I was in middle school I was “forced” to take shop. I was science and math oriented and at the time I didn’t appreciate the skills my shop teachers taught me (skills which I still use today because you can’t find a plumber to come to your house in a timely fashion….) Even in school I began to appreciate the joy of working with your hands and the satisfaction of being able to make or fix something. For many of my fellow students this was a great career opportunity and they went on to become successful small businessmen in the trades. For people in the vocational pathway, classes, such as math, could be oriented to skills needed for the trades (accounting, basic trig, etc.)
Soon we’ll have a country where everyone has a college degree and the value of the degree will be nothing.

The Left, Progressives, Socialists, whatever they call themselves, are rubbing their sweaty palms together in sheer joy over how well their dumbing down of America is working. They are now dangerously close to having a lock on the American electorate who are too ignorant to see through their elected officials stupidity and I offer the likes of Nancy Pelosi to prove my point. She says that extending unemployment benefits is “the best way to stimulate the economy.” So let’s all stand up and cheer that we have “leadership possessed of such nuanced wisdom.” This is so off the wall and so devoid of common sense and conventional wisdom that it can only emanate from a “superior intellect.” She must be a college graduate or the recipient of an honorary degree. Let’s all stand up, cheer and be sure to reelect Nancy with the smiling face. Then quit your job, go on unemployment and take pride; you’re “stimulating the economy.”

I currently make $14+ an hour, part time, in retail, selling appliances. Advertisements in this area for manufacturing jobs offer $9. an hour to start, with a guaranteed $.50 an hour raise after 90 days. Big whoop. I see machinist jobs, experienced only, advertised at $12.50 an hour. BTW, I only put up with my rate of pay because it’s part time, and the employer is flexible. My full time job pays over $22 an hour as a stationary engineer.

When I was job searching two years back because I didn’t like my then working conditions, there were lots of maintenance jobs requiring experience, at about $10. an hour or so. I didn’t consider any of them.

I can just about guarantee that the reason they’re having trouble hiring is that people with the skill sets they want can find, and have found, other, easier jobs, with higher pay. Even retail pays well, if you’re good at it. Quality costs money, and that includes quality employees. A lot of business’s hire by degree, and pay by degree. To get higher pay, you don’t have to be more skilled, you have to jump through hoops. From what I’ve observed of business and government both, almost all supervisory positions could be filled competently by anyone who has gotten to E-5 or above in any branch of service. But, without the hoop jumping, proven performance doesn’t mean squat.

So where are these jobs that are going unfilled? I have passed every math or reading test an employer has given me. But with the only jobs availble it is better to be stupid, it makes it easier to put up with being treated like a moron.

While the article makes valid points, unionization and its attendant ill-effects are only a portion of the poison that has killed the American educational system. The extreme and extremely wasteful bureaucratization Libertyship42 describes is a symptom, or perhaps “sideshow” would be a more fitting description, of the underlying problem.

The central problem is the extreme misallocation of resources that sees an order of magnitude (and probably much more in most districts) more invested in the least capable students as compared to the investment made in the most capable. Money spent per pupil is the most easily identified example of this problem (compare funding of programs for gifted students to funding for the physically or mentally challenged or those deemed “at-risk”) but there are other more subtle related problems. For example: tracking highly disruptive or exceptionally slow children into mainstream classrooms with the effect of retarding the progress of an entire class of students to cater to a troubled individual or two (misallocation of the time of the the capable children who are the true resource that is being squandered by our system); the much higher proportion of teacher’s time spent with the least capable students as opposed to the time spent with the most capble; etc. In a highly competitive world of limited resources these are luxuries we can no longer, and honestly never truly could, afford.

For decades we’ve masked the failure of our educational system by importing large numbers of the best and brightest from the rest of the world. Unable to make the tough decisions necessary to educate our own children, we took the best from nations willing to make the choices we refused. Though the idea of America was certainly attractive the reality of our relatively stable political climate; relatively low tax bite; and relatively lax regulatory policies drew many and allowed those who came to succeed in large numbers. But now the US labors under the burden of what might be the most onerous regulatory state of any major economy; our businesses flounder under, fail because of and flee from one of the most nightmarish tax systems ever conceived and some of the highest business tax rates in the world; our immigrant population swells with the ranks of the uneducated just as jobs they might perform flee to Asia; highly skilled immigrants increasingly choose nations whose economic prospects are brighter than those seen in America; America’s political environment careens wildly towards the cliff of socialism with its only hope of a bright future a far more drastic reversal thus where once was near absolute stability now the only certainty is near chaos. What happens when every advantage that has allowed the United States to make poor decisions for decades is suddenly stripped away just as new competitors have arisen to challenge the economic primacy of this nation? Unfortunately we’re about to find out.

To improve education we must place the pupils with the same abilities in the same classes. There are numerous studies demonstrating that classes so constructed produce better results than mixed classes containing students whose abilities vary greatly. If the studies show that then why doesn’t anyone do anything about it? The answer is politics. In fact, the schools used to be constructed so that there were bright classes and classes that were not so bright. No-one complained about the schools then – about 70 years ago.

Excellent point. I was in the first gifted-children’s program in CA. Every year, there were debates as to whether to cut gifted programs, or Retard programs. I answered it the first time it came up towards the end of the first year, when they said they weren’t sure we would have the program next year. I said, “A retard will never invent anything.” I was 8.

My daughter is very fortunate. Our P.S. system offers a gifted program. She has to go to a school at some distance, but it has paid off. In regular class, she had no friends and was unchallenged… and doing poorly. Now, she has just blossomed. Her social skills have developed extremely well. I told her before she went, that that is how it would be. I was right. Smart kids need to be with smart kids.

Not just for education, but for social development as well. Geeks are socially awkward, because they went to school with average kids.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardized test administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Every three years PISA tests 15-year-olds in reading; mathematical and scientific literacy; and general competencies — that is, how well students apply the knowledge and skills they have learned at school to real-life problems. In the last published results (2006), out of the 57 participating countries on mathematics the United States ranked 32nd.On the science component the United States ranked 24th. Other tests show that the longer that US kids stay in school, the worse they do. In the International Math and Science Study exam, U.S. eighth grade students performed worse, relative to their international peers, than U.S fourth graders.

We all know these loser results are because of a mickey mouse public educational system in the U.S. These kids have been swindled by high school teachers. They have also been swindled by liberal democratic socialism , of which the U.S. public educational system is a prime example. Liberal Democratic Socialism promises Utopia in exchange for individual freedom. It says sweetly “Just lay down your individual preferences, your choice, your self sufficiency and your personal freedom and we will give you a Utopia where there is no link between effort/skill and reward. Just by joining the collective – and why not get your membership in high school? – you will get the same rewards as every other member. Your self esteem will be high. You will pass through each grade whether you are ignorant or knowledgeable. All members of the collective receive the same benefits.”

Lastly they say, “Oh, and did we mention that we, your benefactors, will assume all power over the collective?” They don’t tell the swindled that Utopia will never come because it is being “payed for” with other people’s money. Well other people’s money runs out – ask Greece, Spain, Ireland, Britain, France, Illinois, New York, California and New Jersey. Utopia is a bald-faced lie from which political power is attained.

Until competition is allowed between public and private high school school education (and yes this competition is allowed in Canada), too many U.S kids will continue to be ignorant losers.

The author is quite correct to link the mass production of ignorant, incompetent and uncompetitive American youth back to collectivism. This problem won’t be solved until competition between private and public high-school education is allowed in the U.S.

Excuse the rant, but wasting all that human potential through the use of a big lie really makes me angry.

Lest you think they’re searching for assembly-line workers with PhD’s,…

Wading through the jobs section of Craigslist on a regular basis, I’ve seen a number of postings of lower-tier positions where the prospective employer requires/asks for a degree, where someone without one could likely do the job.

My favorite problem from homeschooling: The sound of a passing motorcycle changes pitch by a half step on the piano. How fast is the motorcycle traveling? What additional information is needed for a more precise answer?

Here is one from today: Jack sprat eats half the salad. His wife eats half of what remains. Jack eats half of what his wife leaves … and so on until not enough salad is left to eat. What fraction of the salad did Jack eat? What fraction did his wife eat?

‘Many Americans are “spoiled brats” with high expectations of everybody except themselves.’
Some of the jobs don’t require special training….just the desire to do the job and earn the money to eat and live. Fox news ran an item about the owner of orchards in Washington who had to go to a Latin American country to find people who would pick apples. This is an example of the things some Americans won’t do. Apparently the $9.00 hourly wage is not high enough. Someone should have told many of the non workers that they aren’t even worth that $9.00 an hour. Starting at an early age kids are told how great they are. They are rarely told they are failing and no one thinks that gloppy finger painting should be in a gallery. I think the problem starts then.

Read Charlotte Iserbyt (The Dumbing Down Of America) to understand how the education of Americans has been deliberately sabotaged by right and left. America, starting with the Reagan Administration, has been deliberately deindustrialized. With no jobs, education became unnecessary for the masses. I was a Junior Achievement advisor in the early 1980′s. These students, at that late date, still showed the desire to learn and accomplish. To my chagrin, my group wanted to produce stash-boxes. They said these would sell to their fellow students. A group of nascent ruthless entrepreneurs, willing to sell anything to anyone! We made albums, hinged and using fine wood veneer. One of the group was the son of a machine shop owner. He made a ball-and-socket hinge assembly that could be rotated away from the rest of the book (he should have patented it). These students all came from a traditional American family, where dad worked (Aircraft and Space industries), and mom cared for the young. All had been guided by their parents on how to think for themselves. Imagine attempting this with a group of students who watch the mindless drivel on television today, while mom and dad are both holding two jobs. Imagine attempting to communicate with a group who has never read a book, and that speaks the subset of the English language required to text and tweet. Imagine trying to communicate with a group that speaks Ebonics, or Spanish first-English second. That is the saddest aspect of our future. Language is the symbol-set with which we form our thoughts. Older cultures like the Egyptian made jumps in civilization, and than froze in time. I am not an ethnologist, but perhaps cultures stagnate due to the limitations of the language. It was the European culture, that absorbed the symbology of many cultures, that made the great strides in the arts and sciences. Denigrate our symbol set, and you perform a lobotomy on the national capacity to think.

That is exactly what sociology (often masquerading as philosophy) has done, over time. Courtesy of the German & French “thinkers” mostly, but this Old World disease has spread and America lapped it up.

Sad but not surprising. My last 8-10 years in the Navy, the decline in new sailors’ academic preparation was very noticeable. They were smart kids, but they’d never been taught anything. It was interesting to watch, because they took readily to each new computer system that came along, but their appreciation of what was being represented on an operations display was below the level older sailors would have had when they were in 6th grade. Facility with gadgets isn’t education; it’s a skill like typing that suits you to help someone else do the “thinking” work. Nothing wrong with any of these skills, but if you’re going to understand what’s happening when a cruise missile is headed for your ship, or why India and Pakistan are always upset with each other, you need a lot more than the ability to text your friends.

I discovered the same thing in the private sector. Young people are smart, they are willing to work hard but their basic academic preparation was minimal. The number of college graduates that “understand math at a ninth-grade level” is about one in every 500 in my experience. They can find the answers to math questions from their ipad, iphone, etc. but are clueless about understanding how/why things work.

The more I read of the situation, the more I think I might still be able to compete in the marketplace, despite my atrocious health. Of course, I could never get hired, because they look for pedigree. Gotta have that piece of paper.I am highly educated, just not formally educated.

Part of the problem lies with the folks doing the hiring. There is no judgment employed. Yes, I know about Duke Power Co. However, you can’t just abstain from using any discretion at all. There are certain intangibles which must be sought: 3 R’s; critical thinking skills; IQ; work ethic; manner of speech and grammar; heck, even just, plain manners.

“Well, if it’s jobs Americans can’t do, doesn’t sound like the illegal immigrant population, as a whole, would be able to do them, either.”

Funny you should say that.

One of my California consulting clients, who actually manufactured things to sell all over the world, got an audit from the EEOC based on a Mexican American being passed over for promotion to a lead position. He neglected to mention in his complaint that the successful applicant was a Mexican immigrant who got his primary education in Mexico and could do error free basic math. The young lady who came to perform the “audit” was a Latina attorney with a chip the size of a tree trunk on her shoulder. I’ll never forget the look on her face when the sucessful applicant was introduced to her. Or having the HR manager recount what the young lady said when she was shown the complainants attendance and disciplinary record. Now in fairness 95% of the people who worked in this company were hardworking, dedicated people. But the ones who went to school in our community schools had incredibly poor math skills. It’s really hard to promote or even train people if they can’t do basic math.

A lot of this is the attitude.
Don’t flush the toilet during your phone interview.
Leave your cell phone in the car, during business hours. Period.
I don’t care if you can “multi-task” do that on your own time.
Do the job I give you correctly.
Multiply and Divide, Add and Subtract, do the rest left to right.
Do not bring your parents to your interview to negotiate your salary.
Dress for your interview, I expect it.
Your employment application contains legal permissions and warnings that your resume doesn’t.
Again, the attitude, you need me worse than I need you.
I hire 100, and I fire 98. Deal with it.

In negotiating away our freedom for security, we have done the sensible thing … and smothered the inner man. We have heard the sweet song of the union bosses who have wooed us from uncertainty to stasis. But life, she will not permit stasis. Change happens anyway. And now millions who cashed in their passion for a paycheck have long lost both.

It’s not just the unions that have smothered freedom. Trial lawyers and the lawsuit culture they have nurtured have had a big hand in it as well, by inducing American businesses and individuals by the millions to trade in their freedoms to create and innovate for a defensive, process-oriented mentality that ensures that they won’t get sued. Except, of course, when it doesn’t.

It is heartening to see that most of you realize that the article barely scratches the surface of our problems. Would that we could solve them simply by cursing unions and Bolsheviks. We want good stuff cheap and the process of getting good stuff cheap has gotten us to where we are.

If anyone bothers to read the whole article from the NYT, you can see that our writer exaggerated a bit. Most of the guys they want are not expected to simply be able to do 9th grade math, but often operate very complicated machinery etc. (and for not a whole lot of money.) The essay here is essentially goofy union bashing. Certainly, the role of unions has to be rethought and some balance achieved that permits us to compete globally. But given all the complications involved, which many people here have done a good job describing, there are no easy solutions. Maybe if the economy truly breaks a good part of our culture, a whole new set of priorities, expected pay scales, niceness of cars, size of houses etc. wi;l re-form, but such things can be worked out only with a lot of fear, trembling, and pain, things that few of us would choose to endure IF WE COULD AVOID IT.

OK, I probably couldn’t pass without a remedial class, but that’s mostly because going to law school gave me a learning disability. Whenever someone asks a question my first impulse is to object, rather than answer it.

They are just not paying enough. Believe me I am sympathetic to all this ranting and raving about unions and schools. I like to indulge in it myself. But $13 per hour for someone who is capable of being trained for a sophisticated manufacturing job is just not enough.

Scott, very, extremely insightful. I think this is one of your best pieces. And I think the “job compartmentalization” you speak of may have started within the union sector, but it has spread throughout the country. My husband and I were talking about this yesterday–if something happened to him and he could no longer do software development, he would start over with another field that he WAS able to do, instead of choosing to draw a disability check every month for the rest of his life.

And while you place the blame squarely on the public unions, that kind of thought may have started with them, but it’s pervasive throughout the country. We hear complaints about parents not caring about their children’s education, children ultimately not caring about their own education… And I wonder how much of that is due to the infantilization of the adult & the growing dependency on the government to take care of them.

“[t]he soul of man thrills to the threat of uncertainty.” Beautifully said. A friend of mine once told me that, if there was no risk of failure, there was no chance for success.